Worldwide: Zimbabweans whisper for their supper

'Psst," the young man hissed, as I drank a cup of coffee on the veranda of a roadside cafe. The hisser was furtive, but it was not diamonds or cocaine that he was trying to sell me - it was food.

He was offering 20lb of maize meal for Z$2,500, which is equal to anything from two to 50 pence depending on which exchange rate you use. The minimum wage for a labourer is about Z$7,000 a month, the same price as 2lb of imported margarine in the nearby supermarket. Local margarine is no longer available.

We whisper arrangements. I will meet him behind the garage across the road in 45 minutes. At the appointed time, I drive along a sanitary lane at the back of the garage, and wait.

These deals take time. Two youths emerge from under a tarpaulin covering the back of a derelict pick-up and hiss at me. I hiss back. They drag four 20lb sacks of maize meal into the back of my car.

The packs are wrapped in loose plastic sacks to disguise the tell-tale shape of a 20lb bag. I dig into about three inches of Z$500 notes, pick out Z$10,000, and the transaction is over.

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The youths disappear back under the tarpaulin of the pick-up, and I have my maize, enough to feed the woman who works for me and her family when I go away for Christmas.

But more shopping has to be done. Sugar. That is usually available from youths at a shopping centre further west. As they see my old car roaring round the corner, they smile and disappear for a couple of minutes, re-emerging with a 4lb pack of sugar in a cardboard box. The price has gone up to Z$500.

Next on my list is milk. Too late - it's 9.30am and all the milk in the supermarkets was sold an hour earlier. The bread queues at bakeries are too formidable to join. Many of the bakeries are next door to coffee shops, yet sipping a cappuccino while watching people queue for food is too uncomfortable.

Then a blow to the solar plexus. Why the hell didn't I notice that my petrol gauge was near empty? We had a week of no fuel queues, and like summer, I thought it would go on for ever.

There is not enough in the tank to get to my "stash". A stash, or a friendly garage owner, is essential for those who cannot face queuing - or rather can afford not to.

A friend drives 10 miles away, fills up at my friendly garage, then drives to me, and we suck a tube and siphon enough petrol to get me to the garage to fill up.

I will have to phone 10 minutes ahead before getting there - which is difficult as mobile phones hardly work. Calling ahead is necessary so that the garage owner can tell me if the coast is clear, so that he can arrange for me to jump the queue without being lynched as a "white supremacist".

On the way back from my hunt for maize meal, sugar and milk, I pass children begging at traffic lights. There are six traffic lights to get through before home, and at each one I give them sugar, a teaspoonful wrapped in paper, taken from coffee shops.

There is no point in giving them money, as most people cannot afford to give enough on a regular basis to buy even a banana, and sugar is a treat.

Along the roads, the four-wheel-drive vehicles speed to the suburbs, driven by rich members of the black middle class, girls with hair expensively plaited, ears fixed to cell phones. On the side of the uneven streets, the dwindling working class trudge home, unable to afford even a bus ticket.

Out in the desolate townships and shanty towns it's worse. A woman bit the lip off another who jumped a queue a couple of weeks ago. On a hot afternoon recently fists flew at a bread queue on the western outskirts of town.

At a township east of Harare on the same day there was a queue for cheap maize meal distributed by a local ruling party official touting for votes at an upcoming by-election.

He was selling it to people with a ruling party card that pre-dated the disputed March presidential elections, which gave President Robert Mugabe another six years in power.

Opposition youths, who far outnumbered the ruling party shoppers, were grinning broadly. They claimed to have "redistributed" some of the food to those who had been turned away.

Last week, the World Food Programme issued a sudden warning about the deteriorating food situation in Zimbabwe.

Yet for those whose pockets are stuffed with a few inches of Z$500 notes, everything can still be all right in Harare.